There is a Kenya for everyone: the variety of landscapes, situations, contrasts and beauty of this country means that the most varied travellers can visit it, even at the same time, who would have nothing to do with each other in any other environment and in few other pleasant situations.
There is the African enthusiast, who you give a slice of endless sky, a tuft of savannah and a maasai jumping and jumping in jujubes, there is the adventure lover who can't wait to experience a thrill, put a knife sideways in his mouth and crawl along raising red earth. There is the one who seeks another kind of adventure and wild Kenya, especially looking forward to the encounters. There are the rock climbers who find rock for their boots, the kitesurfers and deep-sea fishermen who fall in love with the Indian Ocean, the safari animal lovers who don't miss a giraffe-neck sunset and a lion's dawn
And then there are the tourists, the ones who, in this August that is finally a season invented for them, have returned en masse to repopulate the beaches of the Kenyan coast.


They are the ones who started complaining even before they left, about the price of the flights, the length of the trip, the pre-emptive stopover in Zanzibar, the transfer from Mombasa with too many trucks to pass.
Those who take it out on the tour operator because too often the clouds obscure the beautiful equatorial sun and won't give them a perfect tan, or that they weren't warned that during their holiday the tide during the day is almost always low.
Those who are too windy on the beach and spend entire days between sunbed and pool, drinking litres of exotic juices thanks to their all-inclusive bracelet. They know more or less as much about Africa as an electrician from Irpinia knows about Scandinavian literature, but they can compare the buffet at the Watamu resort with those in Hurgada, Santo Domingo and Phuket, remembering every single side dish by heart. But they can enjoy the climate, even sweater-like in the evenings and a far cry from the usual stifling Italian summer heat of the ante-chamber to hell. They will appreciate the good-natured simplicity and spontaneous smiles of the waiters and staff that immediately make you think Kenyans are good people.
In this August there are more than two thousand Italian tourists, an army of selfie-takers who, if they venture beyond the animated fortress of the village, between a muscular awakening and a musical reminiscence, are fed to the voracious beach boys. And here they are, bargaining the price of a visit to disturb hermit crabs and moray eels, unwittingly killing starfish and puffer fish, being told stories and invented geographies and teaching them new swear words.


It's a trawl, and the great thing about coastal Kenya is that among the hundreds of souls landing backwards, there is always someone who steps forward. And unlike the desert of Sharm or the constant sands of the Maldives, he discovers Africa, in all its natural, fascinating and controversial beauty. He discovers humble and welcoming people who are not called Prezzemolo, Cristiano Ronaldo or Toblerone, a life that runs on the edge of survival but with a dignity that has been forgotten elsewhere, vegetation that is humiliated but always predominant, and so many facets that sneeze an entire continent in your face, even in this not-so-clean tourist handkerchief. Of course, you also come across the justifiably holiday-like aspects of life beyond the hotel room: shopping in the local bazaars, buying garish sarongs and cover-ups and souvenirs to take to friends and relatives and other amenities, street food from cheerful shits, a beach party to reaffirm the attractive diversity of human forms of the local population, and finally tasting a real speciality of Kenyan cuisine. Malindi and Watamu are full of them, they are seen and advertised in every restaurant and even in the kiosks by the sea: pizza!
Some will be horrified back in the resort, barricading themselves in the clichés, in the ‘poor people, they have nothing’ and ‘they all live in mud huts with dry palm roofs’ and ‘it's all our fault’, but also in the ‘they see us as travelling wallets’ and ‘they take advantage of us’ with the single variant ‘she (or he) is different from all the others’.
Others, brandishing their iPhones and snapping the latest instagram, will think more prosaically ‘fuck them’.
Who knows if, behind the deforming mirrors of this age of fake reflections, someone will be left with the image of the real Africa and will feel the need, after just one holiday, to be a little more real himself.